Open Source tool: Vagrant OPENSOURCE. Learn it. Use it. Software tools are great and sharing tools and supporting the OpenSource community is a good thing. This is part of a multi-part post. I will share my experience setting up ScaleIO in my vmware Fusion Lab. First find a tool to make provisioning quicker, more consistent, and automated. Tool: Vagrant From the vagrant website:

Vagrant provides easy to configure, reproducible, and portable work environments built on top of industry-standard technology and controlled by a single consistent workflow to help maximize the productivity and flexibility of you and your team. To achieve its magic, Vagrant stands on the shoulders of giants. Machines are provisioned on top of VirtualBox, VMware, AWS, or any other provider. Then, industry-standard provisioning tools such as shell scripts, Chef, or Puppet, can be used to automatically install and configure software on the machine.”

EMC ScaleIO at a Glance

EMC ScaleIO is a software-only solution that uses application hosts’ local disks to realize a virtual SAN that is comparable to or better than external SAN storage, but at a fraction of the cost and complexity. ScaleIO makes a convergence of the storage and application layers possible, ending up with a wall-to-wall single layer of hosts. The lightweight software components of ScaleIO are installed on the application hosts alongside applications like databases and hypervisors.

Breaking traditional barriers of storage scalability, ScaleIO scales out to hundreds and thousands of nodes. ScaleIO’s performance scales linearly with the number of application servers and disks. With ScaleIO, any administrator can add, move, or remove servers and capacity on demand during I/O operations. ScaleIO helps ensure the highest level of enterprise-grade resilience while maintaining maximum storage performance.

ScaleIO natively supports all the leading Linux distributions, Windows Server and hypervisors and works agnostically with any SSD, HDD, and network. The product includes encryption at rest and quality of service (QoS) of performance. ScaleIO can be managed from both a command-line interface (CLI) and an intuitive graphical user interface (GUI). Deploying ScaleIO in both greenfield and existing data center environments is a simple process and takes only a few minutes.”